


Bone Deep

by missingparentheses



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Drinking, Infidelity, Kissing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 03:01:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missingparentheses/pseuds/missingparentheses
Summary: Two things are to blame: rum and faulty logic.





	Bone Deep

**Author's Note:**

> Written in honor of reaching [500 Tumblr followers](http://missingparentheses.tumblr.com), using a variety of prompts that miraculously worked together. :) Many thanks to [Heather](http://ladycynthiana.tumblr.com) for helping me decide how to celebrate the milestone, and to [Ren](http://loudspeakr.tumblr.com) for pre-reading this baby and being my ever-ego-stroking cheerleader. Please, you two. I love you so much.
> 
> The following prompts were used:  
> Glassesless  
> Rain room  
> Streetlight  
> “It’s a pain that goes bone deep.”  
> Exploration behind their wives backs.

Two things are to blame: rum and faulty logic.

The drinks start out celebratory, the crew taking them out after work in honor of shooting their one thousandth episode. The bosses buy everyone their first round, but after that Rhett and Link aren’t allowed to spend a penny, so the booze flows from the pockets of their employees with the money they paid them, money well spent for such a team, for such a milestone.

They drink to their crew, to their collective success, to their myriad fans. They drink to a thousand more episodes. It becomes a theme: how many new things can we toast? They drink into the night as crew members disperse, designated drivers taking keys, rides called in, and still the men in charge toast and drink.

Rhett raises his glass to a sickly Chia Lincoln that was never meant to be long for this world. Link raises his to a green card table with a hole in the top. Rhett toasts to an unrenewed tv series. Link toasts to a blood oath signed in a cow pasture. When they look up, they’re alone but for the bedraggled remnants of bar patrons, not a familiar face in sight. Their bloodstreams are buzzing with the song of Captain Morgan, and with hands gripping one another’s sleeves they make their way into the pouring rain.

They walk for a block without reason, still holding one another up, strength in numbers like the buddy system. Link chuckles at the thought.

“‘Member when we got lost at the museum in Raleigh in fourth grade?”

Rhett laughs and concentrates on the words his mouth wants to make. “Th’ buddy system don’t work if both people get lost, huh?”

“You were scared.”

“Wasn’t scared of bein’ lost. Was scared my dad would find out ‘n tan me.”

“Yer wife gonna tan you for comin’ home drunk?”

“Mebbe I’ll jus’ hafta wait till mornin’ to go home.”

Link laughs and wraps his arms around a streetlight pole to steady himself before pulling his glasses from his face. The lenses are coated in rain and he can barely see, but so is his shirt, and there’s nothing left to dry them on. He holds them helplessly, looking around for a solution to his blindness, and then he peers up at the golden man haloed above him.

“Yer like a blurry angel,” he chuckles.

Rhett laughs. “You look like you’re cryin’. You cryin’?”

“Why would I be cryin’? It’s a good day, man!” Link beams up at him, then squints. “I can’t see the rain anymore. I can still feel it though.”

“Maybe it stopped around us. Maybe the light’s like a forcefield.”

“You’re talkin’ crazy.”

“I’m drunk. Yer crazy.”

“You should kiss me.”

Rhett’s body stiffens. “Why?”

“Cause I can’t reach yer stupid face unless you come down here.”

“Why should I kiss you?”

And this is where the faulty logic happens: “‘Cause we’ll never know unless we try it.”

“Never know what?”

“If we made a mistake gettin’ married.”

“That’s a thing you wanna know?”

“You wouldn’t wanna know if you made a mistake?”

Rhett scoffs, then he looks up and down the sidewalk. The action isn’t lost on his friend.

“Yer gonna do it. Yer makin’ sure no one’s around to see.”

Rhett scowls at him before grabbing his hand and dragging him out from under the light. Link is blind, his glasses clutched in his hand as Rhett pulls him through the rain and the darkness, but he trusts him. He trusts him when he trips on a curb and Rhett’s hand grips harder to stop him from falling. He trusts him when he finds himself slung behind a dark building and pressed between a brick wall and the soaked shirt of his best friend. Rhett’s mouth is impatient and angry, and his skin is hot beneath the cold sheen of rain that coats his body. He tastes like rum, and he feels like a hurricane.

The rain and the lust meet halfway at the depth of their bones, sizzling like drops on a red-hot skillet, steam pouring into their bloodstreams and igniting the alcohol already present in the flow. Link reaches up and threads his hands into the soaked hair at the back of Rhett’s head, and he drags him down further, bringing him down to his base level, down to the place where they’re nothing but two drunk men making out next to a dumpster in the rain. Link gives himself over to it. He becomes all the parts of himself that he uses to escape the man he is in the light of day.

He pulls away and sneers, cocky and superior like Seaborne, and when Rhett looks through him with lust-blind eyes and dives back for his lips, Link dodges. Instead he pulls back at the hair in his fists and finds the skin beneath the line of Rhett’s beard, and he licks away the rain and the rum-soaked sweat, dragging his tongue up and back until he’s wrapped his mouth around Rhett’s earlobe. He sinks his teeth into the soft cartilage, just deep enough to hear the big man whimper.

“Touch me, darlin’,” Link murmurs in Lohn’s smooth drawl, and Rhett answers with a growl and a warm palm cupped to the soaked-through denim between Link’s legs. Link bucks up against him, and when the man’s hand doesn’t give him the friction he needs, Link grips the back of Rhett’s neck and swings his body around to reverse their positions. With Rhett pinioned against the wall, Link presses into him, grinding against his leg and the hand caught between them as Rhett curls his fingers around the solid length of him through the wet fabric.

“Kiss me, Link,” Rhett rasps. “I thought it was kissin’ you wanted.”

“I want it all,” Link whines, and Rhett groans in frustration as he takes Link's lips with his again. Their mouths are open and greedy, clumsy with booze and need, and Rhett gasps around Link's tongue.

“You figured out if we made a mistake yet?”

“I won't know till I'm done makin’ it.”

Rhett groans again. “Where’d we park?”

“I ain’t drivin’ anywhere like this.”

“I wasn’t lookin’ to drive anywhere.”

With a growl Link grinds up against his leg again and then kisses his neck with an impatient sigh. Then he grabs his hand. “This way.”

Link leads him back out to the road, and even in the middle of the night in a downpour he drops Rhett’s hand the moment they’re back in public. Rhett follows him, lost in his head and the rum’s filter over the rain-soaked night. Link finds the car and presses the button to unlock the doors, and then he turns, leaning against the passenger door.

The rain cools their skin and the heat of the moment. It washes away the facade, and Link’s left with only what lies bone deep, only himself, and nowhere to hide. The streetlight above the car illuminates the pair like the bright light that shines down on them when the camera watches their every move. Link knows he’s playing a character there too, because he’s got to be the man the audience demands. When is he ever really himself, the man beneath the surface?

Rhett’s fingertips brush the inside of Link’s elbow, bringing him back to the moment.

“Didja decide then?”

Link looks up, squinting against the blur and the rain in his eyes. Suddenly a rush of panic squeezes his chest when he realizes he has no idea where his glasses ended up. Rhett reads it on his face, reaches into his shirt pocket, and hands them over. Link has no memory of Rhett having taken them from his hand.

“Did I decide what?” Link asks when he’s looking again through rain-speckled lenses.

“Which was the mistake? Kissing me or marrying her?”

Link sighs. “C’mere.” He reaches both arms up and around Rhett’s neck to pull him down again, and the man surrounds him like a shelter in the storm, his face pressed to the crook of Link’s neck. “We’re never gonna answer that question.” It’s more of an order than a statement of mystery.

Rhett nods against his shoulder. “Okay.”

“And I’m never drinking rum again. It makes me stupid.”

Rhett sighs. “It wasn’t so bad, was it? Didn’t you say you wanted to know?”

“I did. Now I have to try to forget.”


End file.
